like you can say anything. Keeping me prisoner the way you did before wasn’t in any way legal. It was a kidnapping.”
I like to think of it as involuntary protective custody, but I didn’t say that.
“Be reasonable, Lucien. I know something about you, and you know something about me. It’s not in your best interest for any of it to become public information, frankly. You might want to tell yourself that I would get in big trouble if my own actions became public. You might want to believe it. But are you really sure?”
He bit his lip and thought about it for a long minute. “Let’s make a deal. I get you these components you want, and you go away and never come back. I mean, never, ever come back. Agreed?”
I wasn’t in a position to make the man any promises, but on the other hand I had no reason to think I would need to talk to him again either. “I know of no reason why I would ever be asked to contact you again. Although you might want to consider how easy it was for me to get in here.”
“Why don’t you let me worry about my own security.” He said this as confidently as he could manage to say it, but I saw a shade of worry flit across his face. He spoke into his dataspike. “Luca, could you come in here for a minute?”
Luca came in the room, making sure not to react at all when he saw me sitting across from his boss like a business partner rather than a maintenance worker. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I’m going over to the lab for the next few hours. Cancel all my appointments, and put off anyone who tries to call me. Understood?”
Luca’s composure slipped a little, and he glanced in my direction. “Understood, sir.”
“Don’t worry about this man,” Klein told his assistant. “In fact, you never even saw him in here this morning. Got it?”
“Got it, sir.”
I could have kicked him. He was a fool if he thought his assistant was actually going to keep his mouth shut. If the guy had a girlfriend, she’d be sure to hear about the boss’s weird maintenance worker meeting by dinnertime. On the other hand, I was the one who had chosen to sit down.
“Alright, then. Come with me.” Klein stood up, and I followed him out into the hallway. He walked like he owned the place, which was exactly how he had walked around Huxley Industries on the day I arrested him. Hell, he kept walking around like he owned the place even after I arrested him. Maybe that was enough, because no one seemed to question his right to lead a maintenance worker through the office. No one even looked up as he walked by.
“I didn’t index the components. I’ll have to find them,” he said at the door, then led me into a small lab filled with random android parts and humming computer systems. One desk had an android head on it, and I wasn’t sure, but I got the impression it was watching me. It didn’t look much like a corporate lab, more like a tech guy’s playroom. On the other hand, that kind of fit. This was only a think tank, after all. He went to a cabinet and opened the door, then he closed it again and opened a desk.
“Ah, yes. That’s right.” He went to a table in the back of the room, rummaged around in one of the drawers, and pulled out a package. “Hold this.” He handed it over and then searched a few more drawers before pulling out a second package. “This is what you need. Although I have to say, I hate the thought of you people poking around in Huxley’s mind. He was a smart man.”
The clear implication of this was that we were not, and I had no problem at all accepting that this was true in my case. For some strange reason, I felt defensive about Thomas Young, though. “We have people that can handle it.”
“No, you don’t.” He shook his head. “Despite what you might think, you really don’t. Julian Huxley was one for the ages.”
4
Raven didn’t run over and hug me when I got back, although to be fair I had remained on the planet this time. When I came into the safehouse, she waved to me with her fingers from the couch and continued with her project of stripping her